A/N: Hello again! Furiabuia here, i just wanted to say that now that my exams are finished (for now, anyways) i should have more time to dedicate to this story, and as such i hope to be able to release around one chapter a week; there may be more or less depending by how inspired i am at the moment, or how much free time i have on my hands, but you get the idea. That said, i retire to the narrator's quarters and leave you with this second chapter; as for the first one, constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated. Enjoy!

Chapter 2: Hope

Day 01, Time: unknown, Location: unknown.

Wakefulness came slowly to Andrea: he felt strangely warm and light-headed, and he also noticed a curious absence of weight, as if gravity no longer held him: "So strange.." he thought, "is that what being dead is like?"
Being captivated by this sensation, he tried to move his arms around, but noticed that his movements were kind of sluggish and impeded, as if he was swimming, and then he hit something solid; keeping his hands in motion and following the form of the object, he noticed that whatever it was, it was surrounding him.

The situation was getting stranger and stranger by the second, and he started thinking that he might not be actually dead: in fact, he could hear himself breathing, and dead people don't need to breathe, do they? He tried to open his eyes but all he could see, no matter where he looked, was a certain sickly red colour, and just that colour; he couldn't see anything else because of how thick the damn thing was!…Wait, thick? He started to touch his body, and felt a mask on his face and plastic tubes connected to him in strategic places, and then the horror of his situation hit him: he was trapped and kept alive in a holding tank, with no way to escape.

Just as his breathing and heartbeat skyrocketed on the onset of panic, he felt some liquid being injected into him by the IVs attached to his body, and whatever that fluid was he felt himself calming down, even if apparently his mental functions were not affected; because of this, there was absolutely nothing to dull the appalling amount of pain when the tubes, especially the front and rear catheters, violently disconnected; shortly after it, even though he was still shocked by the pain, he heard a loud gurgling noise as the liquid he was suspended in was drained, bringing down the tank glass with it.

Subjected to the equalizing force of gravity once again, Andrea fell hard on the metal floor below the tank, breathing heavily and shivering at the sudden cold: yes, he was very much alive, and it hurt like a fucking bitch!
And that's when he heard a hoarse, feminine voice whimpering quietly, "You…you're awake…finally."

As the pain subsided, Andrea started to take notice of his surroundings: he was in a rather wide, dimly lit room, with a low ceiling; its only ornaments were his empty holding tank and another one just next to it, this one still full of red liquid, both fixed against one of the walls with strange pipes and machinery connecting the tanks themselves, and a pair of white, menacing looking beds equipped with robotic arms, that were situated on the other side of the room, just in front of him.

A pair of side doors, or rather, hatches were located on two opposite directions leading out of the room, but the most noticeable feature was that pretty much everything was made of the same futuristic-looking material: to Andrea's eyes it seemed to be steel, but with sophisticated composite fibers weaved into it in intricate exagonal patterns, even if the colour could vary from the white of the surgery tables and the tanks, to the chromed walls that reflected the dim, light blue neon lights, to the matte gray of the floor.

Andrea tried to stand up, but his body rebelled and he fell to his knees, retching from the shock of his revival procedure and shivering from the cold; he was buck naked and covered in fluid, and the temperature he felt was quite sharply low. At this, Roma cried in fright and moved quickly to his side to scan him, calming only after she had confirmation that those were temporary symptoms and after increasing the temperature in the room to avoid him risking hypothermia, then she retreated to where she was before, sitting cross-legged on the floor near the tanks.

Feeling less cold and having stopped retching, Andrea managed to sit as well, putting himself a fair distance from both the cold walls and the girl, whom he now eyed for the first time in his (second) life. The battleship had gone from being a fiery angel of death, to a sobbing wreck: her long, raven-coloured locks of hair were torn and cut irregularly along the whole length of her once beautiful mane, and her abyss-blue eyes had turned red from the amount of tears she shed; her snow-white and red toga was shredded here and there, exposing bits of the soft skin underneath, and her arms sported scratch marks and dried blood from the wrists to the exposed shoulders.

They stared at each other for a time, and the young man was quite confused: "How am I alive?" he asked at nobody in a hushed tone, raising his eyes to look at nothing in particular, "Why am I in the same room with the girl who killed me? Why isn't she striking at me? And why is she looking like she was tortured? And where am I?"

To his surprise, Roma answered, crying: "We are aboard my hull. I…I was the one who revitalized you. After I…*sniff*…I stabbed you that day, my body absorbed your blood and…that t-triggered protocols I didn't know I had that sent me into overload! *sob* I…I saw everything. Trough your memories, I saw the attack…the suffering, the s-s-s-screams, the blood and the c-corpses…so many corpses…*sniff* I sunk my…my companions, but I couldn't manage to end myself. I couldn't stop…crying since then, and I don't know what happened to me!" after a brief pause to wipe her tears, she continued: "I brought you aboard in stasis, hoping that once revived, you could explain to me what it is that I'm…feeling, and how to get rid of it, because" she started tearing again, "Because it's horrible and I can't take this anymore!" she bawled, hugging her long and pale legs.

The young man stared at her blankly, trying not to cry himself, for he remembered what happened to his wife that night, and it hurt. A lot. Because of that, he couldn't quite bring himself to sympathize with his assassin even in her wretched state, but he hated seeing women cry, and as such the sight in front of him was still capable of moving his heart.

"I have a lot of questions, but they can wait." he said, in a sad but gentle tone of voice, "What matters is that I don't know what I did to you nor do I know how to take it away, and I wouldn't do that even if I could. It's the least you deserve for what you have done. But-" he continued, as the sobbing and the bawling went on, "-the fact that you feel like this means that you do possess humanity." ...He sighed, and remembering the last words his wife said to him, he made a decision.

"I can't forget what you have done…nor forgive you for it, and I probably never will. But I can help you learn how to live with it, and how to handle human emotions: the guilt, sadness and fright that you're feeling now, but also joy, satisfaction, and others that are too many to count. Maybe even love…if you will ever find it. This is my offer: take it if you wish, and I'll set you on the path."

To Roma those words were like a life sentence; all the torturing emotions she felt, coupled with despair at the prospect of staying in her cursed condition for her whole lifespan and the frustration spawned by Andrea's refusal to just cure whatever infection he bestowed onto her, were bringing her closer and closer to another breakdown. And the assumption that she now was human? Preposterous, how could that be?!

"No….no…nonono nononoNO...noooo…this is not possible! I can't stay like this forever, I'll go insane!" she cried, directing a pleading look at Andrea, "If what I am feeling are human emotions, and you won't take them away, then I really can't be one with the Fog anymore! But…I also can't keep living like this…and now I don't even have the will…*sniff*…to initiate my self destruct sequence! It does seem that your offer is…my only…hope? Is this...hope that which I'm feeling..? It feels…good." she concluded, with the faintest hint of a smile.

Still, there was something holding her from embracing that hope completely: "There is one more thing I need to tell you…the woman next to you, she was your wife, right?"

Andrea jumped at his feet and looked at her with a glimmer of hope himself: "Yes, she was! Did you manage to revive her as well?"

Roma, if possible, paled even more at the question and resumed weeping: "N-no…it was too late for her. Cellular degradation had started already in her b-brain by the time I put her in stasis. Yours was relatively unscathed, but…" she explained, as Andrea fell to his knees with his hope crushed, "…and that is not all. Her body, unlike yours, was mostly intact, and I had to e-examine it to understand your biology and putting together the revival procedure; I would have stopped at that, but you needed a h-heart…and a lung…and countless other organic t-tissues, which…I took from her. Then, to be able to sustain your body, I had to..I had to d-decompose hers at molecular level with nanomachines…and inject the p-product, the nutrients that you n-needed into your body…I'm-I'm s-sorry, I'm soo so-sorry, there was- there was no other way…"

Andrea was destroyed. It was not enough to have his wife die in his arms and be killed himself, noooo, whatever divinity was in charge of planet Earth was so cruel to decide that he was to be brought back to the realm of the living…by feeding him his own wife. Silence fell in the room, such silence that Andrea could feel his...no, her heart beating inside his took hold of his mind as he slumped to the floor, asking a question which almost went unheard: "So…that liquid I was suspended in…was…"

The answer was short and quiet, a little, damning whisper: "Yes… yes it was…"
Then Roma whispered again: "But…there were still signs of life in her body. I didn't know what it was at first, but I believe it should be what humans are before the beginning of thir life cycle; I managed to stabilize it with nanomachines, and isolated the organ that contained it in the tank next to yours…as of the last scan I did, the organism's cells were alive and slowly growing in numbers…" A feeling of relief hit Roma as she finished her confession; now all she could do was hope that the man would not take back his offer.

That same confession shook Andrea out of his trance. Did the girl just say that she saved his child? He looked at the closed tank, full of crimson coloured fluid: somewhere, in there, his son (or daughter) was growing, kept alive and safe by his mother, although in a somewhat twisted way. "You…you saved me, and maybe even saved my child," he said, while slowly raising himself on his feet, "..you still have much horror and suffering to atone for, but you are already well on your way to be human, more than you think. You took the path of humanity even before I offered my hand in help." He concluded, looking over the hunched form of Roma.

"So…will-will you be my c-captain?" she asked, hopeful.
"Captain? Is that a figure of speech?" Andrea asked, baffled by the question.

"Didn't I tell you before? I am, or was, a ship of the fog; we are aboard my hull, but both my hull and the girl you see…are me. I AM the ship. So, I will ask again: will you be my captain?"

It was now Andrea's turn to be afraid, for he had now something to protect, something very, very dear and precious to him…and to protect it, he needed the girl in front of him. Still, there was no hint of that fear in his voice when he replied, just coldness. A coldness born of pain, anger, and a broken heart. "Yes. Yes I will."